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Mobilize Your MongoDB: Building MongoDB Mobile Apps with OpenShift PaaS Part II

Summary: This is the second part of a blog series that details how to develop a mobile application that is backed by MongoDB and a PaaS. MongoDB makes a great companion to this mobile application given its ability to shard and the nature of being able to store JSON documents with little data manipulation required. In this blog post, part two of the series, we will go over the required components and software in order to develop cross platform mobile applications for the iPhone and Android operating systems. We will also install and configure the backend systems, including mongodb , which makes a perfect data store for the BeerShift mobile application. We will be using the following applications and software stack components: Titanium Studio by Appcelerator Titanium Studio is an all-inclusive powerful Eclipse-based IDE that simplifies the mobile development process. Use Titanium Studio to rapidly build, test, package and publish mobile, desktop and web applications. Take advantage of new functionality like advanced code assisting, ACS integration, module management, Git integration, an enhanced publishing workflow and a full-featured editor. Manage Titanium projects, test your mobile apps in the simulator or on device, automate app packaging deploy to a public or private App Store and much more. * Xcode by Apple Even though we will be using Titanium Studio for our development, we will still need to have Xcode installed and configured so that we have access to several important tools. Not only will we be using the simulator to test out our iPhone application, we will also need the Xcode IDE in order to bundle and submit our application to the Apple App Store. Android SDK Since we are targeting both iOS and Android based devices, we will also need to install and configure the Android SDK for emulating the Android hardware for testing. OpenShift Client Tools OpenShift is Red Hat’s free, auto-scaling Platform as a Service (PaaS) for applications. As an application platform in the cloud, OpenShift manages the stack so you can focus on your code. We will be using this for our backend services and our cloud hosted MongoDB . While not required for this blog post series, I would suggest that a user also install a quality image editing application for sizing of icons and splash screens for your application. I prefer to use an open source software application called Gimp that will provide the user with most of the image editing capabilities they need. Step 1: Installing Xcode Note: If you are planning on targeting iOS platforms, you will typically need an iOS developer account . This will allow you to publish your application to the Apple App Store and receive product updates and announcements about new iOS platforms. This program typically costs 99.00USD per year. There are generally two ways to install Xcode on Mac OS. You can either install via the app store or you can download it directly from the Apple Developer Center. During this blog post, I will assume that you have access to the Apple App Store and will be detailing that route in order to install the IDE. Once you start the App Store application, search for Xcode and you should be directed to the following page: Once on this page, click the free button under the short description in order to install the IDE on your local operating system. Once the installation starts, be patient! Xcode is 1.5 gigs and can take up to a significant amount of time to install even on the fastest of connections. To check the status of the installation, you can go back to the App Store application and click on the Purchases tab at the top of the screen. This will display your current download position and how much time is remaining. Step 2: Installing OpenShift Client Tools Note: If you would rather watch a screencast of this step, check out this video where I demo how to install the client tools on OSX. The OpenShift client tools are written in a very popular programming language called Ruby . With OSX 10.6 and later, ruby is installed by default so installing the client tools is a snap. Simply issue the following command on your terminal application: $ sudo gem install rhc If you don't already have an OpenShift account, head on over to http://openshift.redhat.com and signup. It is completely free and Red Hat gives every user three free applications running in the cloud. At the time of this writing, the combined resources allocated for each user is 1.5gb of memory and 3gb of disk space. Now that we have the client tools installed, we also need to install the GIT source code repository tools. In order to do this, download the package from the GIT website by clicking on the Download for Mac button on the right hand side of the screen. Once the download of is .dmg file is complete, mount the image by clicking on it and open up Finder. Once Finder is open, click on the .pkg file to install GIT to your local system. Follow the installation instructions and close the dialog box once the installation has finished. Open up a new terminal window to ensure that your environment variables, including your path, have been updated to reflect the new git installation. At this point, we can create the backend server for our BeerShift application including the mongo database. For this blog post, we will be using a PHP backend but I have also written a backend for Ruby, Python and Java. $ rhc app create -a beershift -t php-5.3 The above command will provision some space for us on the Red Hat Cloud. It will also create a templated website for us to verify that the application creation was successful. Once the command has finished, verify that the application and server space was created by pointing your browser to the URL provided by the RHC tools. Now that we have an application created, lets create a mongodb data store to house our application data. This can be done by performing the following command. $ rhc-ctl-app -a beershift -e add-mongodb-2.0 This will return the database hostname, port, root user and root password for you to access the database. Don't worry, we will go into more detail on how all of this works with the blog post that covers the backend system for this application. Step 3: Install the Android SDK Appcelerator provides excellent instructions on how to install and configure the Android SDK for use with Titanium Studio. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I suggest that you follow the instructions already provided for this step. Step 4: Install Titanium Studio In order to install and use Titanium Studio, you will need to register for a developer account with Appcelerator. Head on over and click the Download Titanium button on the right hand side of the screen. This will redirect you to a sign up screen. Fill in the required details and submit the form and check your inbox for a validation email. Once you have validated your email, you will be redirected back to the Appcelerator site where you can download Titanium Studio. Once the .dmg file has downloaded, mount the image and follow the instruction to drag Titanium Studio to your Applications folder. Note: When you start the application for the first time, you may be prompted to install a Java runtime. If so, following the instructions that are presented and OSX will automatically find and install the Java runtime for you. Once Titanium Studio starts, you will be prompted for a location to store your workspace. The workspace is a location on your local machine where all of your source files and project settings will be stored. After you select your workspace location, you will be asked for your username and password. This is the username and password that you used to signup for an Appcelerator account. Once you are logged in, that IDE may perform an update to ensure that you are running the latest available code. Now that you have the IDE setup and your SDKs setup, get familiar with the IDE and play around with a few of the sample projects. In the next blog post we will begin development of the backend application and create our REST API that handle communication between the mobile application and the cloud hosted server. * http://www.appcelerator.com/platform/titanium-studio Tagged with: openshift, sdk, iphone, iphone development, objective c, red hat, open source, MongoDB, Mongo, NoSQL, Polyglot persistence, 10gen

May 31, 2012

Mobilize Your MongoDB: Building MongoDB Mobile Apps with OpenShift PaaS

This is the first in a 4-part series by Grant Shipley, Cloud Evangelist for Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-service. Grant’s series will cover the development of “Beershift”, a mobile app for iPhone and Android built using Titanium, OpenShift and MongoDB. MongoDB makes a great companion to this mobile application given its ability to shard store JSON documents with little data manipulation required. In this blog post, we will go over the background of the application and discuss the features we plan to build. Background: I started developing iOS based applications shortly after the arrival of the iPhone on the market. Having been a Java and PHP developer for my entire career, switching to objective-c was a tough challenge for me. I had to remember basic programming methodologies and patterns that I haven't used since college. It took me nearly two months of work at the cadence of 30-40 hours per week to build my first iOS application. To my delight, after releasing the application, the market for the application was larger that I had anticipated. Users were writing great reviews and requesting more features. Shortly after releasing my first iOS based application, Google decided to enter the smartphone market with their android based sdk and devices. This should have been great news for most software developers but for me, a part time mobile developer, it wasn't. I now had users requesting my application for android devices as well as for the new iPad and other tablets that were hitting the market. I didn't have the free time to port my application to the android sdk as it would have required another two months of software development as well as maintaining two separate code streams for patches and updates. About 8 months ago, I heard about a company called Appcelerator and their Titanium SDK . This SDK would allow me to code using javascript but target native UI controls for an array of devices. This sounded like heaven as most of the applications that I write are productivity or novelty based applications that don't rely heavily on 3D graphics. I set out to learn the titanium SDK and was able to develop the BeerShift sample application over a period of two days. About BeerShift: At OpenShift , we enjoy local craft beers and the social aspects of having a pint while discussing the latest trends in software development and deployment. One night, over a pint, we thought it would be cool if we could quickly read a description of the beer and brewery before ordering. We kept discussing the app and of course feature creep started setting in. By the end of the night, we decided to develop a mobile-based application that would allow a user to search for beers, and then log when and where they drank it. Because the team was split between using iOS and Android based phones, we needed it to work on both devices and sync the information via a backend service. Of course, all of this had to be available via the web as well. This was a great opportunity for me to learn Titanium so I set out to develop the application. The biggest unknown was where to get a freely available database of beers that I could search. I researched this question and did some google searching but didn't really come up with any providers that met my needs. Luckily, while speaking at a PHP Users Group in Raleigh, NC, I met a couple of guys who owned a startup called brewerydb.com . With their growing repository of beers and breweries, it had all of the information that I needed in order to develop the sample app. I invited them out for a pint after the user group and we discussed the details. A few days later I had an API key and was ready to get my Titanium Javascript on. Want a quick preview of what we will be building? Check out the video showing the application. BeerShift has a tabbed based UI that consists for 4 main screens. Drink, Drank, Kegstand, and Settings. The settings tab presents the user with username and password input fields. If the username does not exist in the MongoDB database, the user will be prompted if they want to create a new user. The drink tab is the heart of the application. This tab allows the uses to enter in a beer name and will return a result of all beers and breweries that match the search string. The results are retrieved via a REST API call to the openshift server and presented to the user in a table view. The user can select a a beer from the list and then select to ...Drink It“. Once the user has decided to log drinking a beer, the drinking event will be recorded on both the drank tab and the keg stand tab. The keg stand tab will allow the user of the application to view the 50 most recent beers drank by any user of the application. In the next blog post of this series, I will detail the installation of applications and tools needed to begin with development of the BeerShift application. Source Code: All of the source code for this application, including the backend REST API and MongoDBa> integration, is available on github.com/gshipley Tagged with: red hat, open shift, openshift, mobile, apps, application, titanium, sdk, java, objective c, open source, breweries, beer, brewerydb, MongoDB, Mongo, NoSQL, Polyglot persistence, 10gen

May 15, 2012